Cory Booker, crusading young mayor of Newark, NJ, Rhodes Scholar, Yale law graduate, and member of the Columbia Teachers College Board of Trustees, electrified the room while delivering the keynote address at The Campaign for Educational Equity’s second annual symposium which focused on No Child Left Behind. Drawing upon his experiences in Newark, a city plagued by crime and corruption, Booker movingly described both the despair and the promise he has encountered. He spoke of his “pain when I see young people waste opportunities.” He vividly described “kids who struggle, who live on the edge as many young black men do.” He recounted his efforts at intervention, acting as mentor to many, even to the boys caught spray-painting death threats to him. He has responded by meeting the culprits and working with them every weekend. “They are good kids who have become lost in the system,” he explains. His experiences have been eye-opening. Accompanying a troubled young black man to a nice restaurant, he discovered his guest could not read the menu, an irony considering the lunch counter protests in the ‘60’s and heroic efforts to obtain equal access. Speaking of senseless shootings, he lamented he goes to “more funerals for the young than the old.” He also finds good in Newark. “It is amazing to see the lengths to which parents will go” to find a decent education for their children. They fight to protect the schools, teachers, and principals that are excellent. They “plead” to get their youngsters into some of the “great charter schools” that Newark offers. He sympathizes with desperate parents who falsify addresses to get their children into well-regarded suburban schools and then suffer “the indignity of having their child followed around and pulled out of the school.” As to No Child Left Behind, the mayor finds “good and bad in this complex legislation.” He believes “accountability” is key to success. (A history of no accountability has been disastrous for Newark.) He supports clear standards, sophisticated ways of measuring progress, and consequences for failure. Noting that the nation cannot afford to waste its most valuable resource, the upcoming generation, he stated, “We must find ways of making the system work….We must expand islands of excellence into continents of success.” While others speak of war as the great issue of the day, Booker believes the “biggest threat to our democracy is internal, not external.” We have failed to achieve the “great ideals at the core of our founding.” We are still “so far away from manifesting the dream of America.” Newark has lost more young men to local gunfire than to the battles in Iraq. In a soul-stirring salute to James Baldwin and his book The Fire Next Time, Booker exclaimed, “I know in my heart…in Newark fires are going to blaze again, not of rebellion but of hope… the torch of the American dream will illuminate American cities.” He urged, “We can do it. It’s not a question of ability; it’s a question of desire.”#